Ashley Williams (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cannotrest) wrote2018-07-09 06:27 pm
cannotrest) wrote2018-07-09 06:27 pm
Entry tags:
ME3 Synthesis personality
If there's one thing that Ashley's heavily influenced by, it's her family. Ashley is very family-oriented, having helped raise her three younger sisters while their military father was on duty. They were close growing up because they moved around a lot on their father's postings, and she remains close to them even as they scatter out over the galaxy. She is protective of her sisters to the point that she took emergency leave from the military to come back home and walk her youngest sister, Sarah, to school when Sarah's boyfriend wasn't taking no for an answer. (Turned out Sar didn't need her help, but Ashley was completely prepared to kick his ass.) She also tends to mother people besides her blood relations, putting aside her own grief to comfort a squadmate after a platoon member dies, sympathizing with a fallen platoon member's husband while he's grieving, and reassuring her squadmate Liara after her planet was taken over by hostiles.
Introduced in the main trilogy fighting for her life after her entire unit is wiped out in an ambush, Ashley is a fighter; she outright says she's spent her whole life fighting for what she wanted. She's determined to deal with her problems herself without asking anyone for help. Her old Drill Instructor praised her endurance and her squadmate gave her command of the unit because she "keep[s her] head on straight when things go crazy". Part of this is, according to her, a Williams thing, as she calls Williams women, like herself, "a decisive bunch" and says that Williamses "may not always get it right, but we don't give up". Part of it is a reaction to the Alliance's discrimination against her family, as Ashley feels she "has to be better than the best" to make up for her grandfather's surrender. Hand in hand with that toughness, Ashley tends to be blunt, voicing her opinions on the Citadel Council (like an alien United Nations) while out and about on the Citadel and pointing out in an otherwise serious mission briefing that "with all due respect" tends to mean "kiss my ass". She's also a snarky teammate, happily teasing her squadmates, sassing Shepard, and giving deadpan responses to genuine questions.
Ashley has a military mindset which continues off the field, as she finds it strange that people worry about every day life when a machine species is attacking, and for the most part, it also overrides personal relationships, as she was fully prepared to shoot down Wrex, a longtime squadmate, if she needed to for a mission to succeed. Even without a mission at hand, she buries the parts of herself she thinks people will perceive as weaknesses. She has a soft spot for classic English poetry, quoting it to express her feelings because she thinks she's bad at words, but asks Shepard not to spread it around. She's religious, believing in a god and that her father watches her from Heaven, but she's reluctant to talk about it, knowing people might not take it well.
Though Ashley used to believe she wasn't "worth what [she] was fighting for", she's grown into her promotions to Lieutenant Commander and status as the second human Spectre (intergalactic special agent). She's now confident enough to cheerfully call herself a "glamorous and beautiful superstar Spectre agent" and Shepard a pretender after encountering Shepard's clone. Her past problems with survivor's guilt have also eased. While losing the 212 still haunts her to the point that she doesn't feel she deserves her rapid promotions to Lieutenant Commander, she can now accept people sacrificing themselves for the mission because she knows she would do the same. This is a far cry from her first game habit of instantly blaming herself for other people's choices or bad luck and thinking she should be dead.
Through the final push on a galaxy wide war, Ashley has been nostalgic, spending a lot of time after missions looking back and trying to figure out how they got there. She relaxed on the regulations, having flirted back with a subordinate who flirted with her at a party. However, she was also antsy to get the war over with, if not entirely convinced that they'd make it, so surviving the war and suddenly becoming part synthetic comes as rather a surprise.
After a lifetime of inexperience with aliens and only the knowledge that they had unintentionally caused her family to be blacklisted within the military, having alien squadmates opened Ashley's eyes: She hopes the rest of the galaxy will learn to respect quarians (an alien species others discriminate against), she eagerly volunteered to work with a team of salarians (another species of alien), her first response to a city takeover was to go and protect her alien bosses, and she even came to see Tali, her quarian squadmate, as like a little sister. She does not believe humans are superior to other species, and she has called out a pro-human political party for racism to their representative's face. However, she still resents geth, the synthetic species that wiped out her entire unit, calling them "flashlight heads" and doubting their newfound peace with their creator species can last.
Introduced in the main trilogy fighting for her life after her entire unit is wiped out in an ambush, Ashley is a fighter; she outright says she's spent her whole life fighting for what she wanted. She's determined to deal with her problems herself without asking anyone for help. Her old Drill Instructor praised her endurance and her squadmate gave her command of the unit because she "keep[s her] head on straight when things go crazy". Part of this is, according to her, a Williams thing, as she calls Williams women, like herself, "a decisive bunch" and says that Williamses "may not always get it right, but we don't give up". Part of it is a reaction to the Alliance's discrimination against her family, as Ashley feels she "has to be better than the best" to make up for her grandfather's surrender. Hand in hand with that toughness, Ashley tends to be blunt, voicing her opinions on the Citadel Council (like an alien United Nations) while out and about on the Citadel and pointing out in an otherwise serious mission briefing that "with all due respect" tends to mean "kiss my ass". She's also a snarky teammate, happily teasing her squadmates, sassing Shepard, and giving deadpan responses to genuine questions.
Ashley has a military mindset which continues off the field, as she finds it strange that people worry about every day life when a machine species is attacking, and for the most part, it also overrides personal relationships, as she was fully prepared to shoot down Wrex, a longtime squadmate, if she needed to for a mission to succeed. Even without a mission at hand, she buries the parts of herself she thinks people will perceive as weaknesses. She has a soft spot for classic English poetry, quoting it to express her feelings because she thinks she's bad at words, but asks Shepard not to spread it around. She's religious, believing in a god and that her father watches her from Heaven, but she's reluctant to talk about it, knowing people might not take it well.
Though Ashley used to believe she wasn't "worth what [she] was fighting for", she's grown into her promotions to Lieutenant Commander and status as the second human Spectre (intergalactic special agent). She's now confident enough to cheerfully call herself a "glamorous and beautiful superstar Spectre agent" and Shepard a pretender after encountering Shepard's clone. Her past problems with survivor's guilt have also eased. While losing the 212 still haunts her to the point that she doesn't feel she deserves her rapid promotions to Lieutenant Commander, she can now accept people sacrificing themselves for the mission because she knows she would do the same. This is a far cry from her first game habit of instantly blaming herself for other people's choices or bad luck and thinking she should be dead.
Through the final push on a galaxy wide war, Ashley has been nostalgic, spending a lot of time after missions looking back and trying to figure out how they got there. She relaxed on the regulations, having flirted back with a subordinate who flirted with her at a party. However, she was also antsy to get the war over with, if not entirely convinced that they'd make it, so surviving the war and suddenly becoming part synthetic comes as rather a surprise.
After a lifetime of inexperience with aliens and only the knowledge that they had unintentionally caused her family to be blacklisted within the military, having alien squadmates opened Ashley's eyes: She hopes the rest of the galaxy will learn to respect quarians (an alien species others discriminate against), she eagerly volunteered to work with a team of salarians (another species of alien), her first response to a city takeover was to go and protect her alien bosses, and she even came to see Tali, her quarian squadmate, as like a little sister. She does not believe humans are superior to other species, and she has called out a pro-human political party for racism to their representative's face. However, she still resents geth, the synthetic species that wiped out her entire unit, calling them "flashlight heads" and doubting their newfound peace with their creator species can last.